Here we go again. I’ve been re-reading Kovach and Rosenstiel’s ‘Elements of Journalism’ recently and happened to be in the middle of the chapter on ‘Who journalists work for’ when this popped up in my Twitter stream. Kovach and Rosenstiel make a simple point, and an increasingly important one: we don’t just tell stories for the sake of it; we
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Twi weeks ago I interviewed the journalist Neal Mann following a Q&A session with MA students at City University. Video of both the interview (3 clips of 1-2 minutes each) and the Q&A (around 25 minutes) are embedded below. These are also published under a Creative Commons licence so you can remix them if you wish (please let me know if
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Over the weekend the BBC had to deal with the embarrassing ignorance of someone in their complaints department who appeared to believe that images shared on Twitter were “public domain” and “therefore … not subject to the same copyright laws” as material outside social networks. A blog post, from online communities adviser Andy Mabbett, gathered thousands of pageviews in a
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Plenty of others have given their own opinion on MP Louise Mensch’s suggestion that authorities should be able to shut down social media during civil unrest, so I just want to add a couple of experiences: Here’s the first: when rumours spread about children being kidnapped in supermarket toilets, they first spread by text message (not social media). When they
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It’s one thing to cover rioting on the doorstep of the national press – it’s quite another when squeezed regional newsrooms have to do the same. And as rioting in the UK spread from London to Birmingham and then other cities, some unlikely suspects showed how to cover a riot online even when you don’t have a newsroom. Dominating online
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When Laura Kuenssberg announced she was leaving the BBC for ITV, much was made of what might happen to her Twitter account. Was @BBCLauraK owned by her employer? (After all, it was branded as such, promoted on TV, and tweets were ‘processed’ by BBC producers). Or should Laura be able to take it with her? (After all, it was Laura
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Back in February I blogged about the process of teaching journalism students to think about working with communities. The results have been positive: even where the strategy itself wasn’t successful, the individuals have learned from its execution, its research, or both. And so, for those who were part of this process – and anyone else who’s interested – I thought
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Various parts of the media were hoaxed this week by Belfast student Jonny Campbell’s claim to have won a Twitter internship with Charlie Sheen. The hoax was well planned, and to be fair to the journalists, they did chase up documentation to confirm it. Where they made mistakes provides a good lesson in online verification. Where did the journalist go
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Two experiments by news organisations with Twitter hashtags during today’s UK budget have raised an issue around ‘branding’ and how appropriate it is to social media. The BBC, it seems, is encouraging users to adopt the #BBCBudget hashtag to flag their tweets as part of the ‘national conversation’. Channel 4′s Faisal Islam, above, feels it’s a waste of 3 characters.
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When is an online comment defamatory?
Rob Minto looks at two recent cases that leave the field of libel online as confusing as ever. For several years, newspapers, bloggers and other online publishers have been waiting for a landmark case to clarify defamation online. The unanswered questions have been along the lines of: who’s responsible – the author or publisher (or even ISP)? What jurisdiction will
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regulation, law and ethics, twitter • Tags: colin elsbury, comments, daily mail, defamation, eddie talbot, jane clift, justice sharp, libel, twitter • Comment feed RSS 2.0 - Read this post